Archiving a Large Genealogy Collection

2 of 15 boxes. Overflow in front seat

As some of you know, Olive Tree Genealogy recently received a very large collection of genealogy documents and books. My husband and I are slowly going through the 15 boxes of material, and sorting them into groups.

We are not studying the material or taking an inventory at this point. We simply want to organize the documents so we can choose our first set of records for inventory while storing the rest.

Then we plan to methodically go through each "group" or set of documents, taking a careful inventory and deciding how/if we can make the records accessible to genealogists and historians.



I neglected to take a photo of all our groups but here is how we organized the materials as we went through each box:

• Published genealogy books
• Published genealogy booklets
• Family genealogies 
• Newspaper clippings
• Genealogy research notes
• Garbage

Start of the "Groups" That's me in the chair

Garbage? Did Someone Say GARBAGE????

Yes there was garbage. This collection has obviously been underway for many dozens of years. There were binders of printouts from Ancestral File (Remember that?) and other assorted printouts that had no current genealogical value. We spotted printouts dating back to the early 1980s. Most pages were in plastic sleeves in binders, so we spent some time (several hours) removing pages from binders, then removing the paper from the sleeves. We shredded the paper, kept the sleeves for the hundreds of loose documents we spotted, and will be tossing the binders if we find we do not need them for other loose documents in this collection.

We'll move on to more of the groups in the next blog post. If you want to follow along on our progress on this journey, just click on one of the tags or keywords at the bottom of this post.